Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates survivors

Holocaust survivor Anna Weslo (L) with her daughter Susan Segal share a moment together at her residence at the Abramson Center for Jewish Life in Horsham Friday, April 25, 2014. Photo by Mark C Psoras

Monday is Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is held each spring to commemorate the Holocaust and its millions of victims. Today, nearly 70 years since the end of World War II and the liberation of concentration camps, the number of remaining Holocaust survivors is dwindling. Many of those still living are committed to sharing their stories to ensure that the Holocaust is never forgotten. Anna Weslow is one of those survivors.

Weslow, 91, moved into Horsham’s Madlyn and Leonard Abramson Center for Jewish Life about nine months ago. The center is currently home to 11 other Holocaust survivors.

Weslow was born in Tarnow, Poland, where she lived with her parents, three brothers and one sister. Her family wasn’t very worried when World War II first broke out in 1939. “My mother lived through the first World War, and there were no problems,” she said. “She went to Czechoslovakia, and then she went back to Poland and the house was in order. We all thought it was going to be the same war. But this was different.”

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When German soldiers first entered Tarnow, they didn’t bother anyone, Weslow said. After a few weeks, though, the soldiers began to target the Jews. “My father was an Orthodox Jew, so he wore a beard and a hat,” she said. He went out shopping one day and when he came back, his beard had been torn off. Next, the Jews were forced to hand over all of their gold and silver. If the soldiers found out that you had kept anything of value, Weslow said, they would kill you.

As the war continued, life started getting harder for the Jews of Tarnow. Each day, the German soldiers would round up hundreds of Jews and take them away. They wouldn’t take entire families, Weslow said; they would take one or two people from each house. “We didn’t know where they took them,” she said. “But after one person escaped from the place that they took him, he told us this was a death sentence. They’re killing everybody.”

They knew that their lives were in danger, but there was nothing they could do about. “We weren’t organized. We had no guns, we had nothing,” Weslow said. “So we just waited for the death.”

All of the city’s Jews were forced to leave their homes and live in a ghetto. Weslow was 15 at the time, and she was put to work making knapsacks for the Germans. “They gave us one slice of bread but we were happy that we were working,” she said. “But after the work stopped, they started to take people away from the city.” Those who were still in the ghetto knew that their family members were being taken to concentration camps, although they didn’t know yet what a concentration camp was.

Weslow was eventually transported to the Plaszow camp, which was right outside of Krakow. Girls her age were responsible for mending the soldiers’ uniforms. “Some people knew how to sew, and you made believe you did if you didn’t know how to sew,” she said. Luckily, Weslow had learned how to sew at her school.

At this point, she didn’t know where most of her family members were. One of her brothers was with her at Plaszow, but then she was transferred to Auschwitz. “In Auschwitz, I can’t explain how it looked,” Weslow said. “It was terrible.” They were starved and many people got sick. Some would go digging through garbage cans looking for pieces of potato skin. There were gas chambers in the camp, as well as buses that would gas the passengers. There were also ovens. “First they’d kill them, and then they’d burn them,” she said.

When the war ended, Weslow was working in Terezin, a concentration camp outside of Prague. She’ll never forget the day that the camp was liberated. Although everyone was happy to be free, it was a bittersweet time, Weslow explained. She found out that her brother, the one who was with her at Plaszow, had been killed in Austria. As for the rest of her family, they were all gone. “I lost my whole family,” she said. “My mother, my father, my brothers, my sister. All the cousins, the uncles, everybody from the whole family, I’m the only survivor.”

She was taken from Czechoslovakia to Austria, which was occupied by the Americans at the time. “They were very, very nice,” she said. “We had plenty of food and everything. They gave us food, they gave us clothes, they had schools. We had it good there.”

She lived in Austria for four years. During that time she was married and had her first child. Her husband was from another town in Poland and had also spent time in the concentration camps. His friend, who was already in New York City, guaranteed him a factory job and a place to live, so the family left Europe and arrived in America in the summer of 1949.

Weslow lived in New York City for 12 years and then moved to Brooklyn. She had two more children, and she and her husband opened a grocery store. Each month, they would meet with other survivors living in New York. “We talked about (the Holocaust) with each other, because we went through a lot together,” she said. Since coming to America, she has had no desire to visit her homeland.

As hard as it is for Weslow to talk about her time in the concentration camps, she feels it’s important to share her story. “People should never forget what happened to six million people,” she said. All of the family members she lost during the war are always in her thoughts. “Every night when I go to sleep, I mention everybody’s name,” she said. “If not, I can’t sleep. It doesn’t go away.”